This is of immense significance for the argument being made here: that in addition to the novel’s representations of spatial segregation and of Anglo-Indian “exile,” the preponderance of sanitary thinking, social hygiene, and the rise of germ theory make Passage an important text on the spatializing and, indeed, sexualizing logics of health in the interwar British Raj.Īs numerous critics have noted, the novel begins with a detailed description of the civil station in Chandrapore, immediately setting the residences of the colonials against the rest of the city. This gives new valences to the ultimate border-crossing in the novel: Adela Quested’s imagined sexual assault by the Muslim physician Dr. The writing and publication of Passage were contemporaneous with these discourses, which included a growing international movement against “White Slavery,” i.e. Using discourses of health, social hygiene, and contagion – both in and contemporaneous with the novel – I argue that at the heart of A Passage to India lies an anxiety about racial border-crossing that is at once spatial, sexual, and infectious, what Priscilla Wald in another context has termed “spatial promiscuity.” This spatial promiscuity was especially resonant in the discourses of venereal and nonvenereal infectious disease.
This scholarly lacuna is particularly glaring given that one of the protagonists of the novel, Aziz, is a native physician in the colonial health services. However, critical work on colonial space in the novel often ignores the centrality of health and disease in the narrative and how they mediate the characters’ experiences of space.
Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) may be one of the most important novels chronicling the spatial logics of segregation during the zenith of the British Raj.
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